Which way your heart will go...

My best friend sent me a song a while back called, "Which Way Your Heart Will Go," by Mason Jennings. The song itself is a love song that takes the idea of fate and intertwines it into the human condition of heartache with an effortless combination of truth and soulful reality.

"Where would we be right now, if all my dreams had come true. Deep down I know somehow, I'd have never seen your face."

When we're young, idealistic, focused and ready to take on the world, we never see our future as a fleeting fancy or a faltering timeline of failures and struggle. We only see the end product, and never think for a second that the journey to get to that place can get muddled, altered, distorted, and lost along the way. Staring so intently at the stars above, we see only the station but rarely ever the train itself.

Plenty of hopeless romantics have come before me and many will come after, but it always seems so troubling that we live in an age where hopeless romanticism has become more or less a figment of a writer's overactive imagination. The idea that love will find us — fall into our lap even — is more scoffed at more than the tooth fairy. We search this earth for our kindred spirits, believing deep down that somewhere, someday, we will stumble into the life of the one true love meant for us since birth.

Naivety? I highly doubt it. I personally refuse to let this bitter world beat down my faith in something so special and rare. No matter how often my friends are convinced I'm just being overdramatic, hopeless, my heart resolves itself to continuing that search in earnest. Heartbreak is par for the course because in any thing of greatness, we have to risk pain and suffering, which makes it all the more worth our while.

Our heart breaks, it heals, it scars, but it can't lose that idealism that made it as pure as a child's. The childlike wonder inside of us — that faith — must continue on, even when the world tells us we're hopeless, lost or failures. Each one of our journeys has a different path. One path may be longer than another, one may have more pitfalls than the previous, but it all leads to another soul designed and created for you and you alone.

Giving up one's heart is a leap of faith, and requires a large amount of trust because of what's at stake. Some can be careless with it, some can be too careful and others may simply refuse to accept it. But like the matching designs of the rarest of duplicate snowflakes, the heart's center gravitates towards the core of its reason for existing. Every step on this path takes us one closer to that counterpoint.

You can ask yourself if this is the life you dreamed of when you were a child and most will reply with a negative, but this is what makes the surprise of destiny so special. Where would I be right now if all my dreams had come true? The wait only increases the appreciation for it once it's destiny is fulfilled. My heart's counterpoint may be miles away, years from uniting its existence with my own, but the search can never end.

Deep down I know somehow, I'd have never seen your face...the world would be a different place..all this is with a purpose, and that purpose is you — whoever you are.